Getting the most out of OWB and the Oracle Database

UI things to know in mapping

Not something I use every day, since most of my mappings are not overly complex, but something that may help in any real developers life are some of the following UI gimmicks:

Customizing the operators in a mapping

Horizontal scroll bars in operators

Multi-Select in mapping

Sorting in the operator itself

The first two are actually managed from one of the View menu options. By default the operator look like this:

If you go (in mapping!) to View -> Options you get this dialog and it allows you to make the operator smaller...

If I switch all of the Columns properties off I get the smallest possible operator only showing the actual attribute names... Then I switched on the horizontal scroll bar and I get this operator:

Obviously this is the extreme case, but in many cases in input and output connectors may be not very relevant and it does save some space...

The other two items in this list are about sorting and selecting. Each operator in mapping can be sorted on all its columns. So in the table we looked at, you can sort by attribute name, or by keys, or by the connections (both sides) or by data type. Like I said, all of them play. The way to do this is by clicking the column header (yes there is one, see the red box on the picture below):

You can then sort on a column header, to the right we did this on attribute name and you get a tooltip if you hover over the grey area/header. We decided to keep these things small (hence the thin grey header) and not start indicating on the toolbar due to lack of space on it... The tooltip should do the trick...

Now the reason you want to sort is that you are looking for things, and if you find it (lets assume this is an SAP or Oracle EBS table with 200 attributes) you want to map this across. Now you do not want to do this one at a time, so you multi-select the attributes. Do this in the standard way, using either CTRL-click to select a single attribute while doing multi-select or SHIFT-click to select a set of attributes in a continuous selection. Then let go and drag from one of the selected ones to the next operator... It will map all of those selected...

This makes mapping of very long and large tables a lot simpler. Now, there are more things we are looking at implementing but that is a while out due to the release cycle. We are looking and creating some mapping features specifically for large objects and very large mappings. So more to come but be patient!